Apple's iTunes store: 500,000 iOS apps and counting
Less than three years after it opened for business, the App Store hit the half-million mark — Click to enlarge. Source: 148Apps, Chomp and Chillingo — Here's a nice round number likely to be trotted out at the Apple's (AAPL) Worldwide Developers Conference in June.
Context & Ripple Effects
The catalog has doubled in roughly nine months: Fortune counted 250,000 apps at the end of August 2010 and the store crossed 500,000 by May 2011, less than three years after launch. That pace matters because counting itself has been contested — an earlier October 2010 check on the 300,000 figure showed how third-party trackers like 148Apps, Chomp and Chillingo can diverge on what qualifies, so this round number arrives with an asterisk even as it sets up a likely showcase at June's Worldwide Developers Conference.
First-order effects
- iOS developers face a catalog twice the size of last summer's, where visibility depends increasingly on charts and search rather than sheer availability.
- Apple gains its headline metric for WWDC in June, where it is also rumored to preview a cloud-music service alongside the app milestone.
Second-order effects
- Rival storefronts are pushed to compete on scale claims of their own, while discovery tools like Chomp — already cited as a source for these counts — become more valuable as raw browsing stops scaling.
- The Lodsys patent dispute, with Apple asserting developers are protected under its license, lands on the same population of small app makers now crowding the store.
Third-order effects
- If catalog size keeps doubling annually, competitive advantage shifts from breadth of inventory toward curation and discovery quality — the question of whether an app store's size still matters once content dominates.
- Apple's role as gatekeeper for a half-million titles entrenches the App Store model as the template every other platform copies, for better and worse.
The trend: App-store competition is entering the phase where catalog-size milestones matter less than discovery and curation, as stores pass the point where users can browse them unaided.